American writer whose
best-known poems are noted for their personal imagery and intense
focus.
Sylvia Plath wrote only two books before her suicide at the age of 31.
Her
posthumous collection Ariel (1965) astohished the literary world
with its power. It has become one of the best-selling volumes of poetry
published in England and America in the 20th century. Plath was married
to the poet Ted Hughes.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.(in 'Lady Lazarus,' Ariel,
1965)

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston. Her father Otto Emile Plath,
born in East Prussia, was a professor of biology at Boston University,
who had specialized in bees. During WWII, he was investigated over
alleged "pro-German" sympathies. In the poem 'Daddy' Plath wrote:
"I have always been scared of you, / With your Luftwaffe, your
gobbledygoo." Aurelia Schober, Plath's mother, was twenty years his
junior; they met at Boston University, where he became her instructor
in Middle High German. After the death of her husband in 1940, Aurelia
worked at two jobs to support her children. She sold the house in
Winthorp and moved with her family Wellesley.

At school Plath was a model student: she won scholarships and
prizes. Plath's mother, pushing her to succeed, kept all of her awards
and was very proud of them. To supplement the family income, Plath
worked at menial part-time and summer jobs. To her brother she once
said, "You know, as I do, and it is a frightening thing, that mother
would actually kill herself for us. She is an abnormally altruistic
person, and I have realized lately that we have to fight against her
selflessnes as we would fight against a deadly desease."

Between 1950 and 1963 Plath wrote to her mother nearly a
thousand letters. Letters Home (1975), edited by Aurelia, gives
a portrait of a young woman, who is driven by high hopes alternating
with moods of depression. Plath once said, "It is as if my life were
magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing
negative -- which ever is running at the moment dominates my life,
floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were
smothering. As if a great muscular owl were sitting on my chest, its
talons clenching & constricting my heart."

Plath studied at Gamaliel Bradford Senior High School (now
Wellesley High School) and at the Smith College from 1950 to 1955. Her
first awarded story, 'Sunday at the Mintons,' was published in 1952
while she was at college in magazine Mademoiselle.
In 1953
Plath worked on the college editorial board at the same magazine. She
suffered a mental breakdown which led to a suicide attempt. Plath was
admitted to McClean Hospital where she was given the electro-convulsive
treatment.

Later on
she described this period of her live in The Bell Jar (1963),
an autobiographical novel, which appeared under the pseudonym Victoria
Lucas, a month before her death. With J.D.
Salinger's The Cather in the Rye it is recognized as a
classic of adolescent angst. The novel takes place in New York, at
the height of the Cold War, during the hot summer in which the
Rosenbergs were sent to the electric chair, convicted of spying for the
Soviets. Against this background Plath sets the story of the breakdown
and near-death of her heroine. In the center of the novel is the image the descending bell jar, the suffocating, airless enclosure.

After winning a Fulbright scholarship, Plath attended Newnham
College, Cambridge (England). She met there in 1956 the poet Ted Hughes, "... big, dark, hunky boy, the only
one there huge enough for me,'' whom she married next year. Hughes's
first impression was "American legs / Simply went on up. That flaring
hand, / Those long, balletic, monkey - / elegant fingers. / And the
face -- a tight ball of joy." Their first encounter happened at a
student party, where she bit Hughes on the cheek, really hard. It set
the tone to their tumultuous relationship. Plath decided to be a good
wife, but Hughes was not the ideal husband she imagined: he was moody,
penchant for nosepicking, and dressed slovenly. Also Plath's suspicions
of Hughes's infidelity burdened her.

Plath's early poetry was based on then current styles of
refined and ironic verse. Under the influence of her husband and the
work of Dylan Thomas and Gerald Manley Hopkins, she developed with
great force her talents. In 1957 Plath returned to the U.S., where she
worked as a teacher of literature at the Smith College. From 1958 to
1959 she was employed as a clerk in Boston. At Robert Lowell's course
she studied poetry. Plath moved again to England in 1959. Her first
child, Frieda Rebecca, was born in 1960 and second, Nicholas Farrar, in
1962. On the next year she published the aggressive 'Lady Lazarus' and
the notorious 'Daddy', in which Plath explored the boundaries of her
introspection.

Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. (in 'Daddy', 1966)

When Ted Hughes abandoned her for an another woman, Assia
Gutmann Wevill, the wife of the Canadian poet David Wevill, fantasies
of self-destruction took over of Plath's resolution. Wevill was
German-born, sophisticated woman, with film-star looks. Near the end of
her life, Plath burned hundreds of pages of a work in progress. In one
of her final poems she wrote: ''Dying / is an art, like everything
else. / I do it exceptionally well.''(in 'Lady Lazarus') In a letter to her mother Plath
complained that Hughes had left her in poverty, but according to Elaine
Feinstein, whose well-balanced on Hughes appeared in 2001, he gave her
all their joint savings. The children remained under Plath's care and
she continued working at home.

Plath died in London on February 11, 1963; she committed
suicide. Before he laying her head into the gas oven early in the
morning, she prepared breakfast for her children, took it upstairs and
set near their beds. Her gravestone is in Yorkshire. Hughes's name was
chipped off her tombstone, and his poetry readings were disrupted by
shouts of "murderer." Tragically, Assia Wevill killed herself in the
same way as Plath – by gas. She also killed their daughter, Shura, she
had with Hughes.

During her
career Plath was loosely linked to the confessional poets, a term
used to describe such writers as Robert Lowell,
Anne Sexton (1928-74, committed suicide), and John Berryman. Her literary
reputation rests mainly on her carefully crafted pieces of
poetry, particularly the verse that she composed in the months leading
up to her death. ElizabethHardwick,
who was then married to Lowell, said of Plath that at the
end, she is "both heroine and author: when the curtain goes down, it is
her own dead body there on the stage, sacrified to her own plot." Many
feminist readers held Hughes responsible for her death, but the precise
"reason" for her suicide has been difficult to determine.

A deeply honest writer, Plath's ceaseless self-scrutiny has
given an unique point of view to psychological disorder and fuelled
debates about the psychodynamics of female creativity. In this
discourse, Ted Hughes has become the villain, whom Robin Morgan accused
in 1972 in a poem of killing Plath. "I accuse / Ted Hughes", she stated
in 'The Arraignment'. However, Janet Malcolm has defended Hughes in her
book The Silent Woman (1994), in which she sees Plath's
literary spouse a Prometheus figure who has to "watch his young self
being picked over by biographers, scholars, critics, article writers
and newspaper journalists."

Plath's Collected Poems (1981), assembled and edited
by Ted Hughes, won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Hughes, who explained
that he wanted to spare the children further distress, published in
1982 a heavily edited version of her journals. Feminist critics have
suspected that he tried to protect himself. But when Karen V. Kukil
assembled the unabridged journals, critics doubted the ethics of
dutifully revealing a Plath's unrevised work with grammatical errors
and misspellings. In addition to her diary, where Plath revealed the
feelings of hatred toward her mother, Aurelia was portrated in The
Bell Jar. "I had always been my father's favorite, and it seemed
fitting that I should take on a mourning my mother never bothered
with," the heroine Esther Greenwood says after visiting her father's
grave. In Letters Home Aurelia revealed that for the sake of
her children she withold her tears until she was alone in bed at night.
For a period, she blocked the publication of the book in the United
States due to its unkind portraits and for fear of libel. It finally
appeared in 1971.

For further reading: The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. C.
Newman (1970): Protean Poet by M.L. Broe (1980); Sylvia Plath:
The Critical Heritage by Linda Wagner-Martin (1988); Sylvia Plath by Susan
Bassnett (1897); Bitter Fame by Anne Stevenson (1989); The
Death and Life of Sylvia Plath by Ronald Hayman (1991); Rough Magic by Paul Alexander (1991); The
Haunting of Sylvia Plath by Jacqueline Rose
(1991); The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm (1994); Ariel's
Gift by Erica Wagner (2000); Sylvia
Plath: A Biography by Connie Ann Kirk (2004); Lover
of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed
Love by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev (2006); The
Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath by Jo Gill (2008). Note:
Plath's daughter Frieda Hughes, who become a painter, published in 1999
a collection of poems, entitled Wooroloo. She has also designed
the cover for Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes's book about himself
and Plath. Colossus: first
published by Methuen Press in England, and then on May 14, 1962, by
Alfred A. Knopf in the United States. At its appearance it went
unnoticed. Compared to Ariel, which came out in 1965, Colossus was more formalized.